When conveying persons out of a vehicle, in particular when transporting passengers in aircraft, it is necessary to provide emergency devices for emergency situations that enable the persons in the vehicle to be evacuated quickly and safely to an area outside of the vehicle. In particular it is necessary to provide emergency devices that indicate escape routes to the persons in the vehicle. These escape routes are ideally characterized by a high flow rate, at which the persons are evacuated via the escape route.
Aircraft passengers are evacuated through doors in the fuselage and via emergency chutes associated with the doors. Typically, the basis for modern evacuation scenarios is a maximum flow rate of 110 passengers per door of the aircraft within 90 seconds. If an evacuation of all passengers within 90 seconds has to be guaranteed and it is assumed that only 50% of all of the doors are available for evacuation, the passenger number in the case of a cabin designed with 4 door pairs is limited to 440 persons. An increase of the passenger number is possible only by means of a further door area comprising one or more additional doors. Such a further door area may however be undesirable because of the technical outlay, the cost and the weight.
On the other hand, experience has shown that currently used emergency chutes are in principle capable of dealing with flow rates of more than 110 persons per door and 90 seconds. A lack of orientation among the evacuating passengers may however lead to inhibited behaviour of the passengers. In particular, what may happen is that the passengers are hesitant about quickly stepping through an evacuation door, getting onto the emergency chute adjacent thereto and then quickly getting off the emergency chute. This may lead to a logjam of people and a slow-down of the flow of persons. It is therefore impossible to achieve a high flow rate.
In the document EP 1 365 369 Bl a light-emitting device for indicating an emergency exit is described, by means of which persons are warned of a hazardous situation and guided in the direction of the emergency exit. The device may be operated under normal conditions in a standby state and in the event of an emergency evacuation in an alarm state. In the standby state the device emits a continuous beam of low intensity light. In the alarm state the device emits a discontinuous beam of higher intensity light.
The document EP 1 538 079 Bl describes an emergency chute with lighting on fixed supports. The emergency chute comprises a plurality of inflatable posts, which extend from support parts of the emergency chute that are disposed laterally of the sliding surface. The posts on their ends have sources of illumination for illuminating the sliding surface.